


Voices For The Voiceless

by tielan



Category: Order of the Air Series - Melissa Scott & Jo Graham
Genre: Gen, Growing Up, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 21:20:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8862526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: Stasi and Douglas have a conversation about the war, about people, and about right and wrong.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mari4212](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mari4212/gifts).



Stasi was making dumplings and half-listening to the radio out in the sitting room when she heard Douglas come in, a little later than she’d expected.

He’d gone into town to the hardware store to buy a small box of rivets. The porch roof needed fixing because the leak was getting too much to ignore, and while they could just barely afford to fix it, what with the cost of metal and all, hurricane season was coming. Right now, it was more important to get the roof fixed than to spare the money.

So Hank Kendall from town would be coming over to do the work tomorrow – he owed Gilchrist Aviation a favour for flying his cousin back from that terrible accident at Camp Kearns when the family had no money to pay. Mitch or Lewis might have let the debt pass, but they were off flying Spitfires for the RAAF, weren’t they? Plus, Stasi wasn’t about to get up on the roof to fix things she knew nothing about. And Alma would have called in the favour, no question. Women were always more pragmatic than men – at least when it came to the debts of other men.

The rivets that Stasi and Douglas had found after riffling through what felt like thousands of boxes out in the garage had mitigated the cost, but by Hank’s calculations they’d needed a few more rivets to complete the job, and Stasi did some careful calculations and called in a favour, and in the end they’d only had to use one ration ticket from the book.

Just as well that Stasi had learned long ago how to make things stretch as far as they could.

Out in the entryway, there was the sound of muddy boots being shucked, of a coat being hung up, of the clink of the box of rivets being fished from one of its pockets. Oddly, there was none of the thunderous enthusiasm of energy and noise that usually preceded Douglas.

Stasi shaped the dumplings and wondered if Douglas would tell her what was bothering him. He’d grown up so much in this last year – still enthusiastic and curious, still wanting to know everything, to be told all the stories – but with just a touch of the reserve she remembered from Jimmy at the same age – balancing on the brink of manhood, the fine line between responsible child on the way to mature adult.

He stumped in the door – nearly her height and growing so broad across the shoulders. Not such a little boy anymore, so little he could stand on her feet so they could do the Lindy Hop...

“Got the rivets, Ma. They’re on the sideboard. Ooh, dumplings for dinner! Can I help Mr. Kendall with the roofwork tomorrow?”

That was still Douglas, at least – the mad jumble of questions, the swift switch of topic... Stasi smiled as her fingers shaped the dumplings. “If you promise to do what Mr. Kendall tells you, then...yes, I don’t see why you can’t help _if_ he needs it. But he’s got his own apprentice, you know, so he might not want your help.”

“Okay.” Douglas pulled out the chair on the other side of the kitchen table and sat down. For once he didn’t seem anxious to rush off and listen to the news, or to go out to the garage and rifle through the many boxes that had been tucked out there needing sorting for several years, but sat watching her fold the doughy skins over the cabbage centres.

Stasi let the silence sit, merely humming quietly to the music of the radio, tapping her foot as she went. She didn’t have much by way of spare time these days – while she didn’t have to look after the farm, preparing dinner was still the most peace she got in the day – dinner preparation, and washing up afterwards, before the squabbles about playtime and bedtime began. She wasn’t in a rush to break the silence, and Douglas would talk to her when he was good and ready.

“In the store, Mr Peoples was listening to the radio as he was wrapping up the rivets. He said that there’d been news about the Colorado Governor speaking out against the Internment Camps,” Douglas said slowly. “That Governor Carr said that it was wrong to have them – that the Constitution protected Japanese Americans, just as it did anyone else.”

There was a hesitation in his voice that made Stasi look up from the dough. “I imagine it does, darling.”

“But then...the camps are wrong, aren’t they? If they go against the Constitution.”

Her hands kept moving, shaping the dumplings around the cabbage fillings. And if there was a tremble, well, she was tired. Who wouldn’t be, managing three children who already knew too much about the world and what it contained, who already had an inkling of what the war would cost them?

But she couldn’t let herself think about that right now. Douglas was watching her, his once-round face already losing its puppy fat, lengthening and firming, his features slowly taking on their adult form.

“Yes, darling, the internment camps are wrong. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t think so.” Stasi forced herself to sound light, forced herself not to think of the news they’d received back from Africa and Europe in the last couple of years – sketchy bits and pieces, perhaps, but outlining the shape of things clearly enough.

“But those people in the camps...they’re Americans, too.” Douglas looked up at her, her whimsical and earnest boy – always ready for a story, forever curious about the world and how it worked – and Stasi wished she had a way to make this easier for him. Reality could be cruel – and all the more to someone like Douglas – so like Mitch in his thoughts and words and deeds. “If they’re American, then they have rights, don’t they? _We hold these truths to be self-evident_...”

Stasi dusted her hands over the dumplings, watching the flour drift down on the stretched cheeks of the dumplings, a little clump of dough landing in a dusting of flour, cratering like a bomb dropped on a target.

“People do cruel things when they’re frightened.” Or sometimes just when they had the power to make someone else’s life unpleasant.

“You don’t,” Douglas said, staunchly. “Dad doesn’t. Alma and Lewis and Jerry don’t. And you’ve been frightened for years now.”

“Oh, Douglas...” There was a tickle in her throat that made it hard to breathe. “That’s not... It’s different.” She smiled at him, very firmly, and gathered up the dumplings to put them in the soup to cook.

Douglas was silent behind her, thinking things through, choosing his words in a way that showed just how much he’d grown up in these last four months since Mitch got the telegram that his status had been changed from reserve to active. She blinked fast – something in the soup’s steam, of course. Douglas was well on his way to growing up, already with the responsibilities and heart of a man – a good man.

“I was thinking of that summer in Hawaii. There was a girl I met—Emily Han. I wrote her a letter.” Douglas’ voice was quiet. “She wrote some back. Would they put her...her family...?”

They might, Stasi thought to herself. Or they might not. If her family were good.

Only...good was such a fragile thing on which to base a family’s safety. Such an elusive prize, especially when someone else got to define what ‘good’ was. And sometimes...sometimes you could never be good – ‘good’ was a definition of people who weren’t like you and who you would never be like.

_You can’t expect to raise those Gentile children correctly, can you, Mrs. Sorley? They may not be your blood, but what can they learn from you?_

“Ma?” Douglas asked, hesitant when she didn’t answer.

She took a deep breath and dusted her hands off over the pot, short sharp actions to dispel her discomfort. “I don’t know, darling. Probably not. She’s Chinese, remember, not Japanese.”

“The kids at school say there isn’t a difference – that all the Asians are the same. I said it was like saying that America and Canada aren’t any different, but they said I was wrong.”

“And were you wrong?”

“No!” Douglas scowled. “Because I’ve _met_ Chinese people and Hawaiian people and Japanese people and they’re all different. And...” He looked plaintively at her. “They’re still Americans. Even if the country they came from is doing the wrong thing. _They’re_ not responsible for it.”

Stasi’s chest hurt like something was trying to crawl out of it. She cleared her throat. Once. Twice.

Chair legs scraped behind her. “Ma?”

She heard him come up behind her and turned, wrapping her arms around him. “I’m fine, darling. Just a little tired and...and emotional.”

He leaned back a little and dropped his gaze, abashed. “I’m sorry I brought this to you—”

“No!” She touched his chin, quickly, gently, tipping up his face. When had he grown nearly big enough to look her in the eye? “Douglas, I’m just...I’m proud of you. So proud that you see what’s happening.”

“But you’re sad, too.”

“Well, war is horrible, darling.”

“But we have to fight!”

“Yes, we do. It’s still dreadful, and I hate it.” She wiped her eyes carefully, mindful of her makeup, then looked at her son – her bright, curious son with a mind for a world so much bigger than Colorado Springs could conceive. And growing up so fast – too fast, she sometimes thought, with the war and the underlying tension even before last summer’s incident.

Douglas looked back at her, solemn.

“Ma?”

“Yes?”

He hesitated. “I wish... When Dad and Lewis were called to active reserve, I wished I could join the war like them. I wished I was old enough. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, darling, don’t be.” Stasi took a deep breath. “It’s not glorious to be left behind, I know, but you know what the newsreels say – everyone has their part to play.”

“Like you did when you had to go to DC?”

“Just like then, darling.” Stasi put him away so she could stir the soup, and so he wouldn’t notice her unease.

She’d gone to DC to strengthen the wards on the city such that no long-range German bomber making its way across the Atlantic would find targeting the nation’s capital easy. With Alma on her way to Canada, and Mitch and Lewis recruited to Langley Field, Stasi had had to leave the children in the care of a neighbour for two weeks while she answered Jerry’s call for a medium.

It had been a difficult warding – complex and complicated in a world that was increasingly so – and in the end, the only thing that had made the wards hold was the willing self-sacrifice one of their participants.

_It is a far, far greater thing that I go to do..._

“Would you call Dora to set the table, darling? And then take out the bread loaf ends and cut them up. We’ll finish them off with the soup.”

He bellowed down the hallway with all the enthusiasm of a growing boy, receiving a reply that sounded almost like assent, then took the loaf out of the breadbox and began slicing it up as Stasi tasted the soup and added the last bits and pieces for it.

“Ma?”

“Yes, Douglas?”

He glanced down the corridor and lowered his voice. “Can I do magic? Like you did in DC?”

And that was the other thing about Douglas – he was a sensitive. Not a medium, perhaps, but with enough seer in him to glimpse the things that went unsaid, the things that people didn’t say. And this was the part that she and Mitch had agreed would have to be handled carefully.

“Someday, yes.”

“When? Will you teach me?”

“Yes.” Or Mitch would – or Alma, or Lewis. “But not until you’re older and ready for it.”

“Aww... But when will that be?”

Stasi was tempted to brush him off, to tell him later, when he was grown and older, when he better understood the responsibility that power entailed. Stasi was a medium, but she didn’t need to be a seer to guess the kind of trouble Douglas could get into – a curious child, determined, fearless, willing to experiment...

“Summer,” she said firmly, turning off the stove. “And then, only if I like your school results.”

“Aw, Ma...”

“Magic takes discipline and concentration, not just a wave of the hand. And it’s...exciting, darling, to be part of a working but it’s a responsibility, too. Not to be taken lightly.”

His silence had the quality of a sulk, but when she set the bowls out on the table in front of him, he was looking more thoughtful than sulky, which was a good sign, particularly when he looked up, his face anxious.

“Ma? Do you think—? I can’t fight like Dad and Lewis. And I can’t do magic like you can. But I still want to help. And I thought... Last summer at gran’s, when that negro – Mr Johnson – nearly died because Dr. Hearst wouldn’t treat him, Dad said it was the responsibility of those with a voice to stand up for those who didn’t have one.”

Stasi swallowed both her laugh at how very Mitch that sounded, as well as her instinctive protest at whatever Douglas was about to propose. _You’re just a child, darling_. He wasn’t a child – he was a young man, growing up, learning right from wrong. She took a deep breath. “What are you thinking of doing?”

“Mr. Carr said the internment camps were wrong, and I think they are, too. And I can’t vote yet. But...could I...could I write a letter to tell him that I agree? I could say that I think he’s right about this, and that you and Dad agree with me, right?”

He looked hopefully at Stasi, and her answer clogged up in her throat long enough that she had to cough a little. “Of course you can, Douglas.” It would require postage, maybe, and they couldn’t really afford it, but even just that little bit of effort... “Yes,” she said, more firmly. “We’ll do it tonight, after we’ve dinner.”

The girls came in then, their chatter bright and gusty, talking about school and the day and the other kids in their class. And Douglas taunted Merilee about her crush on one of the boys, and Dora began saying the name of a girl that Douglas apparently liked in a sing-song voice, and Stasi had to hustle them all into the dining room so she could bring the soup pot out to the table and serve everyone.

Children.

Douglas said grace, and the kids tucked into the soup as Stasi looked them over.

Were there children in Europe who had wondered like Douglas if it was right to send their fellows away? Had they asked their parents why this was allowed, and had their parents told them it was okay because it was the law? Were there people who had questioned, who had stood up, who had fought for people who weren’t theirs, who weren’t like them, but who they still thought had rights, even when the world around them said they didn’t?

Stasi didn’t know. If there had been, they’d since been swept away in the tide of politics.

And now her beautiful, intelligent son had laid what was right against what was the law, questioned the difference, and chosen what was right. Their son wanted to stand on the edge to protect those who were left unprotected.

 _A champion_ , whispered a voice in her ear, gentle and prescient. _To stand for the weak, to fight what is wrong, to burn with holy flame..._

As she ate her dinner, Stasi thought she would pay far more than mere postage to keep that flame alive in her son.


End file.
